An Inquiry is Needed to Determine How Canada Became an Accomplice Torture in the U.S.
Most Canadians know the name Maher Arar. It has been clearly established and admitted by our government that misconduct by Canadian officials played a role in Arar’s shameful rendition to torture in Syria. Far fewer of us know the name Benamar Benatta. We should, because credible accounts suggest that Benatta, an Algerian national who applied for refugee status in Canada in the week before 9/11, was rendered back across the border into the hands of American officials who held him for five years, despite the fact the FBI dismissed suggestions he was a terrorist only months after his involuntary surrender to American custody.
During his five years of American imprisonment, Benatta says he was tortured, and a 2004 report from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention agrees his treatment “could be described as torture.” When handed over to American officials, Mr. Benatta had been in Canadian custody for seven days and should have had the benefit of due process guaranteed by law and the Charter. Instead, it appears he was unceremoniously bundled into the back of a car and shipped across the border into the hands of men who were willing to ignore his rights and subject him to years of unwarranted detention and maltreatment.
Since his return to Canada in 2006, Mr. Benatta has received the refugee status he asked for in 2001. What he has been denied is any credible explanation of how Canada came to act as an accomplice to torture in his case. He has been calling since his return for an impartial and public investigation that would provide him, and the Canadian people, with an account of how this civil liberties and human rights nightmare was allowed to unfold. This summer, the BCCLA wrote to Canada’s prime minister, attorney general and minister of public safety, calling for just such an inquiry. To date, we have received no substantive reply. Mr. Benatta, finally safe in Canada after his American ordeal, deserves a public accounting for the role Canada played in sending him into harm’s way. The Canadian people deserve reassurance that our tax dollars will not in the future be used to open the door to a torture chamber. It is past time for an inquiry into the Benatta case. The BCCLA once again urges this government to finally do the right thing and convene such an inquiry.
